Skylight Music Theatre: El Cimarrón

While living in Cuba at the end of the ’60s, the eclectic
German composer Hans Werner Henze set the autobiography of runaway slave
Esteban Montejo to music. The result, El Cimarrón, was not
an opera but something more intimate, a recital for four musicians led by a
baritone in the role of Montejo. El Cimarrón’s
libretto was written by one of Germany’s most astute post-World War II
essayists, the sharply skeptical Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Montejo’s story is a
Caribbean analog to Solomon Northup’s account, 12 Years a Slave.